


To Put Away Childish Things

by what_alchemy



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-07
Updated: 2014-03-07
Packaged: 2018-01-13 00:30:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1206172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/what_alchemy/pseuds/what_alchemy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Phil is restored, he can't sleep. When he goes down to the kitchen, he finds he's not the only one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Put Away Childish Things

**Author's Note:**

  * For [megyal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/megyal/gifts).
  * Inspired by [As Young As Your Hope](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1142622) by [megyal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/megyal/pseuds/megyal). 



> For those checking this out without having read the story this is based on, Frigga turned Phil into a four-year-old to save his life after the Chitauri invasion.

It was 3:06 in the morning, and Phil was five and a half times the size he’d been when he’d woken up the previous day. 

He should have felt as though there were vast space inside himself in which to settle, but instead he felt hemmed in, constricted, as if any movement might cause his skin to bust its seams like an overstuffed rag doll. He gave in to an old habit and worried at the edge of his thumbnail with his teeth as he stared up the ceiling. Beside him in the dim monochrome of the early morning darkness, Clint breathed steady and deep. Phil was glad for it but his own exhaustion felt like a living thing, nipping at the edges of his wakefulness, but still his eyes remained stubbornly open. They were heavy, and the backs of his eyelids felt as if they might have been replaced with a Brillo pad, but they refused to slide shut and give him some relief. 

3:07.

Phil rubbed his eyes. He rubbed his eyes some more. He kept rubbing and rubbing, and he could hear her, his mother with her crystalline voice: _Quit rubbing like that, Philly, you’ll get pink eye._ Phil clenched his hands into fists on his stomach as the breath shuddered out of him. Mom had been dead for ten years — aneurysm, very sudden and very quick — and Phil was, should have been, used to it. But fresh grief gripped him now, twisted his diaphragm up, and he forced his watering eyes shut. He breathed hard until he realized Clint was stirring, and then he screwed his mouth shut and inhaled slow through his nose, held it, and exhaled through pursed lips. Clint settled, and Phil kept up the measured breath until his heart felt less like it was being split in two.

3:10.

Phil got out of bed, careful not to disturb Clint. His feet bare on the cold floor reminded him he was a Ranger and a SHIELD agent, the best of the best in sneaking, and he slipped out the door without a sound.

He made his way to the tower’s communal kitchen, which promised to be more well-stocked than his and Clint’s. Tony had people for that, while Phil and Clint were mostly just a pair of middle aged guys who’d never learned how to work anything more complicated than a crock pot and might be gone for weeks at a time anyway. At any given moment, opening their cabinets might reveal a box of baking soda and some tumbleweeds. That wouldn’t have changed when Clint moved into the tower, and Phil learned that first hand in his tour earlier today. Phil wanted solitude and hot chocolate, as close to what Mom used to make as he could manage, and he wasn’t getting it on the floor he now shared with Clint. 

But when he got to the team floor, he was not alone. Steve sat on a stool before the kitchen island, hunched over the marble top and looking smaller than Phil could have imagined he was capable. There was a plate of sugar cookies in front of him, some Pillsbury tube deal that was impossible to mess up. He half turned at Phil’s arrival, and the smile he sent Phil was brittle and forced.

“Hey, Phil. Not sleepy?”

“No, I — I just can’t seem to get there. I’ll make myself a cocoa and get out of your hair.”

“Hey, don’t,” Steve said. He gestured as if to reach out to Phil, but he seemed to abort the mission mid-move. His arm fell lamely to his side. “You’ve been through a lot lately, and you came here for a reason. I’ll just go back to my floor.”

Phil laughed once. “Look at us,” he said. “We’re ridiculous.”

Steve’s smile looked pained. 

“You all right?” Phil asked him.

Steve shook his head as if clearing his mind of cobwebs. “I’m fine,” he said, not meeting Phil’s eyes. “I’ll be fine.” Steve took a cookie in hand and bit off an entire half. He held the plate out to Phil, who waved him away.

“Do you want some hot cocoa? From scratch, my mom’s old recipe.”

Steve took a moment to chew and swallow. “You sure?”

“I’d really like it if you’d have some with me,” Phil said. He turned and began to bang through the cabinets in search of the ingredients. “My mom would have gotten a kick out of it.” Cocoa powder, sugar, milk, cinnamon, nutmeg. He pulled a saucepan out and set it on the stove. He poured out two and a half cups of milk and turned on the heat. 

“She must have been a hell of a woman,” Steve said. Phil didn’t turn to face him. He kept his eyes on the milk, his grip on the wooden spoon, his control on the lump rising in his throat. He mustered a firm nod. “Your dad, too,” Steve went on. “Guy, I mean. A hell of a guy.”

Phil pushed down the bubble of hysteria that threatened to overtake him at the way Steve got flustered. He stirred the spoon around the milk. When he thought he could speak without either sobbing or laughing, he said, “I was really lucky. I miss them, you know? Usually I’m fine, but.” He shook his head. 

“Do you… I mean, I would really like to hear about them. If you want. To talk.”

Phil risked throwing a wry smile over his shoulder.

“Don’t hurt yourself there, Cap.”

A low, single laugh left Steve in a huff. “I admit I’m not the best at the talking. But I promise I’m great at the part where I listen.”

Phil turned fully and faced Steve. Captain America. His childhood idol. His adulthood idol, if he were honest with himself, and he tried to be. But Steve was not Captain America. Steve was a slumped curl of a man shoveling cookies into his mouth and looking miserable with one side of his hair all sticking up. He looked beautiful the way he was always beautiful, like he walked off the set of some photo shoot for people too gorgeous to be real, but he was so young it made Phil’s chest hurt. Phil felt a tug inside him, like he was four and fifty all at once, like he could understand youth only from the vantage of too much experience. Steve was more than ninety years old and so, so young. 

“Hey,” Phil said. “Are you all right, Steve? Seriously.”

Steve passed a hand over his face and looked more exhausted than ever.

“I should be asking you that.”

“I wasn’t the only one affected by this whole thing. You don’t have to be strong for everyone else and leave no room for yourself, Steve.”

Steve visibly swallowed and the skin around his eyes and mouth tightened, but Phil had to turn his attention back to the simmering milk. 

“I just… liked you,” Steve said quietly. “The little guy. I’m gonna miss him, is all.”

Phil’s heart flopped and his breath got all stopped up somewhere when he faced Steve again, but before he could muster any response, Steve continued hastily.

“I think I’ll like big you, too, don’t get me wrong,” he said. “But me and the little guy, I don’t know. There was something…unassuming about what he expected from me. He didn’t want me to punch Hitler or destroy HYDRA, he just wanted me to play with him and treat him with respect. I wasn’t some kind of symbol for him, because he was too young to think like that.” He wrung out a tired laugh. “I know it sounds really weird, because he was _four_ and the biggest Captain America fan ever, but I felt like for the first time since they pulled me out of the ice, someone liked me not for what I could do for them, but just for my company. Just plain old me.”

Phil stared at him, mouth gone dry, wooden spoon dripping milk on the floor.

“And now he’s gone,” he said. “God, I’m sorry.”

Steve shook his head quickly, eyes big and earnest. “Please don’t be, Phil. I really — this is so selfish. I don’t mean to turn your ordeal into something about me. I’m honestly so glad you’re back, and you’re okay, and Clint’s so happy. That’s — that’s everything, you know? That’s everything.”

Behind him, the milk made a tell-tale hissing, and Phil had to take it off the heat before he had a disaster on his hands. He measured out the dry ingredients into big mugs before pouring the milk in carefully. When he was done mixing it all together, he dumped the saucepan in the sink and brought the mugs over to the kitchen island. He slid one over to Steve, who accepted it with a tired quirk of his lips.

“Thank you,” he said. He raised his mug. “To your parents.” Phil met the toast with a bump of his mug against Steve’s, and together they took their first sips. It was hot and good, and warmth rushed through Phil, who imagined that his mother was right there, enveloping him in one of her perfect hugs. 

“It was my mom, you know,” Phil said after a moment. Steve met his eyes over the marble top, hands closed around his mug as if warming himself. His eyebrows came up in question. “The original Cap fan,” Phil said. “She saw you perform in Chicago when she was a little girl. Saw all the films, read all the comics. Half my vintage collection is originally hers. She went into intelligence after college, but she got injured in ’61. Met my dad. Moved to the suburbs. Had a few babies.” Phil shrugged. “All very sanitized 1950s American dream, but. She wasn’t like any of the other moms. She was really something else.”

Steve smiled. When Phil met his eyes, he looked, for the first time, as wise as his age might imply. 

“She was your hero,” he said. 

Phil clinked his mug against Steve’s one more time. 

 

**End**


End file.
